We’re going to blame YouTube, and not kids growing up in unequal households? YouTube was released a full 6 years after I left school, and I can tell you that all the shit that describe in the article happened previously.
Edit: to clarify, by “unequal households” I’m talking about any household where the male and female parents do not share an equal burden of responsibility for the kids, physically in terms of housework etc, and emotionally in terms of development and education. Or more broadly, households that perpetuate gender stereotypes, which rub off on impressionable kids. In my experience, misogynistic kids almost always come from misogynistic households.
“incel culture”… Incels are viewed as the biggest, most pathetic losers in existence. It’s humiliating to be considered one. So how can there can be an “incel culture”?
>She quoted a study from October 2021 that showed there was a 6% chance of someone being suggested an incel video on YouTube within five steps of a non-related video.
Lol, wtf is this?
Maybe we should stop telling all young men that they are one step away from being an “incel” or “misogynist” or they are “privileged ” for merely being white. For some reason it’s acceptable to stereotyp men and certainly those socially challenged so ofcourse the more vulnerable in those groups are going to start thinking somethings wrong with them and seek out extreme viewpoints. Society literally perpetuates the “incel culture” tbh.
A female teacher I know struggles with teenagers literally masturbating to them in class. This isn’t normal behaviour.
I don’t think calling it in ‘incel culture’ is very accurate.
Suggesting a large portion of secondary school aged boys loathe women doesn’t sit right with me.
They’re school children, they are supposed to be celibate. It’s just misogyny if anything. Calling a child an incel is implying they should be sexually active. Which is more fucked up than the misogyny.
I remember in school the female teachers would treat the boys like cess pits and they wondered why they acted out, whilst the male teachers treated everyone fairly and the classes would be a totally different.
We are raising feral boys who have no father figure at home or in the school place and are looking to internet wannabes or local gangster fuck wits as role models.
Plus it doesn’t help that working class boys are treated as if they have the same privilege as upper classes, just look at the likelihood of working class boys to go to university, if they were a minority in the UK the left would be screaming racism etc.
We were supposed to raise all boats in the harbour but instead we blew a massive hole in the working class boys boat and ignore the SOS signals….
Wow getting downvoted cos I’m not getting on the boys are inherently evil bandwagon…
Crime and punishment. Teenage boys are horny af, but if you punish the behaviour appropriately it will stop. When I was at school 15 years ago it was very difficult to discipline pupils, trying to give kids after school detention got responses from angry parents about kids missing the bus etc. I’ve spoken to a few teachers and they say the situation is now worse, after school detention isn’t possible and even taking away break times is even difficult.
If you have no way to discipline pupils then you won’t have any control over negative behaviour.
I wanted to be a teacher at one point but there is not enough money out there to have me dealing with teenagers
And here we have another example of a word’s meaning being stretched to include broader, more general issues.
It follows the likes of terrorist, transphobe and racist, all words which had clear meanings but are now used as blanket terms and therefore lose their precision and power.
My partner is a teacher and regularly reports the usage of incel language in his classes, but it’s never taken seriously. Glad to know he’s doing the right thing
I mean you can get to anything with 5 random clicks on YouTube. Fuck I mind starting off watching Warhammer lore videos and a few clicks later I was watching something about number station conspiracy shit and DMT.
There’s definitely a problem with a small section of teens that are just fucking ferral. Boys girls seems to make no difference.
It’s unacceptable behaviour but it’s not a surprise at all.
Just read the report ‘a boy today’ that came out last year. It was a cross party report that basically shows boys are left behind in education and lower class boys have fewer opportunities.
That coupled with the multi studies that show female teachers treat boys as lesser and are harsher with their marking etc it’s not a surprise.
I bet a lot of working class boys see no future for themselves and see their teachers treating the girls better. It’ll no doubt lead them into the arms of people in the ‘incel’ community.
You always knew this type of person when you were younger, you couldn’t avoid them as a teenager because there were so many
From what I remember, by the way they used to talk about these things, the root as far as I can tell it was very low self esteem, with them seeing sex as the ‘quick fix’ to feeling better about theirself (which is different to how a well rounded person would frame sex). It was like an acceptance thing. They don’t see it as an experience between two people, they wrongly see it as women as denying the thing which will ‘fix’ them. In reality it’s a more deep rooted psychological issue which needs addressed to make them feel like they don’t “need” that
On that basis I believe the solution is proper funding for mental health services
(Disclaimer should people need it, clearly not all men and boys with mental health issues will behave this way)
This issue is so much more complicated than focusing on a victim group. It is a failure to frame this as being important only because it is distressing for the teachers rather than a failure of the system for the children.
Boys have a lack of positive and constructive role models and stories. Even something as simple as fairy tales teach boys they’re either the hero who gets the princess or the wolf/villain. This perpetuates through the entire education system.
Then there’s social media constantly pushing the narrative of ‘all men’ and that internalised idea that boys are innately monsters perpetuates. This is why when people say these things they need to remember it’s closing the conceptual door on men not being monsters.
Worst of all the hidden challenges that teenage boys face are seen as non issues. Almost every boy will experience violence of some kind. They are more likely to be killed. They are more likely to be victims of a crime. But this isn’t seen as an issue and in turn, boys are taught that violence is ok – meaning they eventually use violence as it hasn’t been taught as wrong, more likely to commit crime because it’s so normalised.
The solution is not to hear how awful it is for the teachers.
So many comments about female teachers being universally shit and how boys don’t have a chance in single mother households and not a single one considering the effect this kind of language must be having on the girls in the classroom.
it has been noted that the girls have been dealing with a rise of aggressive sexual bullying and harrassment but typical uk education it only becomes a problem when it starts the affect the teachers. Incel attitudes needs to be dealt with throughout the school years. my daughter had some very unpleasant experiences in reception year. the school took their sweet time to tackle it. in the end I had to give the headmistress step by step instructions.
This has been the case among teenage boys for decades at the very least, there has just been little reporting of it. I went to an all-boy’s school in the 00’s and the behaviour would be sickening to a modern observer. Violence, misogyny and otherwise demeaning sexual terminology and bullying. It unfortunately can easily become normalised within such groups without outside intervention. Then sadly once this happens it is much easier to demonise and punish than it is to fix.
If you look at educational achievement, crime and suicide levels teenage boys and young men are something of a “left behind” group that doesn’t recieve sufficient guidance. There needs to be more mentoring of teenage boys, further attempts to understand their issues and challenges, guidance towards apropriate behaviour and away from peer pressure towards indecent or criminal behaviour. Often boys have few male and female role models and in schools it is common for more of a prisoner/guard relationship to form rather than a bilaterally respectful one. I am not sure entirely how this can be overcome, but I think with greater: coaching, building of young men’s confidence and inspiration there would be much more hope of success.
As a male secondary school teacher, let me just get one thing out of the way. Whether we like it or not, teenagers “mask” themselves onto adults who are like them — ethnic minority kids look up to ethnic minority teachers, female students seek out female teachers, and boys like to ask male teachers about things like exercise. I don’t like that this is the case, but it’s part of what happens when you go from being a narrow-minded teenager to being an open-minded adult. So I’ve reluctantly accepted that teenage boys are more likely to listen to me on these matters, even if I’m not always the most qualified person to speak to.
With that in mind, I don’t know if it’s the case that teenage boys are getting any worse in terms of their actions and behaviour — testosterone has always made teenagers do stupid things — but I will say that the sexist language they use is more clearly influenced by the incel and manosphere cultures online, which basically teach them that feminism is to blame for gender inequality (oh the irony). It’s old sexism with a new lexicon. I usually have to give the boys in every class that I teach a chat about why I’m a feminist, and why that (crazily enough) doesn’t stop me from going on dates with my wife, exercising or watching football. Yes, this is a concept they sometimes don’t understand.
As with any sexist view, most boys fall into these false dichotomies because they see girls as “the other”. Although this separation is reinforced in friendship groups, on social media and in mass media, it’s always been there — let’s not forget that we’re only a few years out from Page 3 girls and Nuts magazine. I distinctly remember boys posting up torn out pages of lads’ mags on our Sixth Form notice bord when I was at school. Saying it’s a new development ignores the underlying issue, which is that gendering things as being “for boys” and “for girls” creates dichotomies that lead to boys and girls segregating themselves (and yes, PE lessons contribute to this too, sadly).
In turn, I’m willing to agree that conversations around rape culture and privilege don’t always help this matter either, since they are often inherently gendered. But it’s not as if ignoring these things prevents boys from doing them, and young men do need to be made aware of the difference between how they see themselves and how they are seen by society, in the same way that a young black man needs to know that n incompetent police officer might see him differently to how he sees himself.
There’s no easy solution to any of this, but as long as teachers try to avoid gendering their students and making sweeping generalisations about boys and girls, then at least we’re fundamentally altering our thinking and modelling a more equitable society for our students. And I know from doing audits in to primary schools and other secondary schools that the younger teachers are beginning to do that.
I can’t help but worry that terms like “incel culture” exacerbate the problem.
Most teenage boys are celibate, and not voluntarily. Using the term “incel” as a negative characteristic is not going to get them on your side.
Those who recognise that they are involuntarily celibate, and offer sympathy, then become extremely attractive to these kids. But these communities are unhealthy, generally focussing on the anger rather than solutions.
Being an awkward teenager can be frustrating. They end up frustrated, but they need support, not disdain.
As a male teacher, I’ve noticed similar behaviour. I wouldn’t say they are incels but are starting to tick the boxes. Too many are misogynistic but it’s clear where it comes from – home. They are and hear the language at home, their parents think they can do no wrong (and this doesn’t just apply to these boys) and they create echo chambers with their friendship groups. It’s not LOADS of them but it’s enough.
This doesn’t surprise me – I don’t doubt that misogyny has been a problem in schools for a long time, but the Internet has provided essentially a formalised pipeline to misogyny these days for disaffected teenage boys.
It’s easy for boys to feel lonely, isolated, or romantically incapable at school, and even easier to look for answers to those problems online. 30 years ago you’d have asked your parents or a friend and they’d probably have given some decent advice reinforced with the general cultural biases at the time.
Nowadays, the problem lies with the ease of going from searching for “how to get a girlfriend” to things like Red Pill/PUA/seduction, or rabid right-wing anti-feminist content, or incel communities in this case. It’s hard to stay in shallow waters when there’s algorithms in everything you use pushing more extreme content in your YouTube sidebar or your Tiktok feed.
These communities provide extreme answers and negative emotional validation to your problems. The women and girls at your school are hypergamous sluts to be manipulated for romance/sex, or they’ve gone too far with feminism and now can do whatever horrible things they want, or they would just never look at you in a million years because you’re subhuman to them. These are all things that make you angry and get you invested. You learn all the lingo and terms that make you incomprehensible to others outside that bubble and drive you deeper in.
The ultimate problem is that teenage boys are looking for answers to why they feel bad the way they do, and the easiest way to get those answers (the Internet) pushes them towards answers that make them angry at women.
It even gets kids who are reasonably well-adjusted. If you like gaming, the online culture inherent among gamers and things like YouTube recommendations will push you towards “anti-SJW” content and then further and further down the rabbit hole. You can like Pewdiepie for games, get recommended his meme review series, watch the one with Ben Shapiro in it, and then start getting recommended Daily Wire nonsense. Congratulations, you’re in the pipeline.
For a realistic solution, teaching kids about the Internet as a place where critical thinking needs to be engaged is probably pretty vital. There needs to be talk of algorithms, of not accepting comments and videos and posts as fact, and of critically engaging with content. Put it in ICT or Citizenship or English class or whatever.
A more idealistic solution would be addressing toxic masculinity as a whole. These boys are not dealing with their emotions in a healthy way, and the pressure to be cool and manly and composed is probably a good part of that. Removing the idea that men must suffer in silence, whether dealing with their emotions internally works for them in a healthy way or not, would probably help these boys a lot – they could lean on friends and family and even teachers for support, and not need negative validation from extremist communities.
Itt: people who dont go to school and arent teachers just pulling cognitive dissonance out of their arses.
Teenage boys are using the lingo from incel communities you only find online, so its probably the massive attempt of right wing ideologies trying to recruit young men as opposed to too many _divorces_ or whatever bs.
There is a concerted culture war going on and we need to do something about it – but won’t, because it helps the right gain “anti woke” warriors.
Really worrying how online culture is no longer being contained online, these kids grow up with the internet as such a big part of their life from a very young age so they really don’t see the difference. They’re exposed to so much violence and hate and sexual content that is often fucked up. It’s bound to have an impact. Teachers can’t be the ones responsible for fixing it.
Bloody hell, the comments in this thread are something else.
Apparently we fight inceldom by… teaching boys that they’re important and that schools/society is currently set up to favour women. Gee, that definitely sounds like it’ll work.
I’ve been talking about this very subject with a teacher. He said that misogyny is really popular with especially the younger high school students and that there are a lot of boys with the attitude that girls shouldn’t have rights.
Letting social media raise our kids is causing a lot of problems.
Edit: if anyone wants to see thhe type of nasty idiot I’m talking about, look for the replies to me from /u/azazelcrowley
Apparently women are the only people in history who have never suffered and this is men getting revenge for women being women or something.
Wow, it didn’t take long for this to become a ‘single mothers are to blame for men hating women’ thread.
I’ve taught a handful of odious little shits in my time. The difference between now and when I was at school is that they have access to inner ideology and support groups that are giving them an ideological framework and vocabulary for their bpoor behaviour.
Most of the (18-21) young men I’ve worked with are lovely, open and warm. Some are lost between what they’ve been told they should be by their cultural influences and their natural personalities/preferences. I.e. young men who get no pleasure from social/monetary competition- guys who just want to earn enough to keep them going while also giving them time to do what they enjoy, be that train spotting, drawing, reading, their buddies.
From my experience, young men don’t benefit from expectations that they should provide or succeed. They should be encouraged to find what they enjoy and find satisfying, even if it’s something they’ll never make big money out of. Figuring out the things that make you fulfilled is a big part of becoming a decent human being.
This thread really worries me. It’s as if people are refusing to acknowledge this rising problem.
In the boys school near me some of the lads took videos of their teacher, just like doing her job, and uploaded it on PornHub as well as editing pics of her like face on pornstars bodies. My boyfriend told me about it and I reported it to my school to tell the boys school but nothing was done
The issue is not “incels”; that’s a snappy buzzword used by the media and internet to enrage people. It is easy to point at a single group of people (in this case unattractive virgin men) and say “Look! They are the problem; we get rid of them and everything goes back to normal!”
Guess what: that isn’t how you tackle a systemic problem stemming from a wide range of cultural and societal issues.
Do ugly virgin teenager resent women because they feel isolated? Some of them, yes. But that is a much smaller number than the number of socially popular people that also dislike women.
Implying that it’s only virgin losers that are misogynistic ignores the vast number of men that commit acts of domestic violence, consume misogynistic media, or are products of a misogynistic father/culture.
Of all the violent and sexist men I have had the misfortune of encountering, not one of them has been a virgin.
Sounds to me like another “boys will be boys!” situation where blaming something related that is not the root cause is the solution.
Women have been dealing with misogyny forever. I don’t even want to begin to talk about some of the shit the boys would say/do in the early 2000s before “incel culture” even existed.
We’re blaming the internet instead of blaming society for not addressing this shit already. Get your fucking boys under control before they grow up to be predators. It’s not rocket science.
31 comments
We’re going to blame YouTube, and not kids growing up in unequal households? YouTube was released a full 6 years after I left school, and I can tell you that all the shit that describe in the article happened previously.
Edit: to clarify, by “unequal households” I’m talking about any household where the male and female parents do not share an equal burden of responsibility for the kids, physically in terms of housework etc, and emotionally in terms of development and education. Or more broadly, households that perpetuate gender stereotypes, which rub off on impressionable kids. In my experience, misogynistic kids almost always come from misogynistic households.
“incel culture”… Incels are viewed as the biggest, most pathetic losers in existence. It’s humiliating to be considered one. So how can there can be an “incel culture”?
>She quoted a study from October 2021 that showed there was a 6% chance of someone being suggested an incel video on YouTube within five steps of a non-related video.
Lol, wtf is this?
Maybe we should stop telling all young men that they are one step away from being an “incel” or “misogynist” or they are “privileged ” for merely being white. For some reason it’s acceptable to stereotyp men and certainly those socially challenged so ofcourse the more vulnerable in those groups are going to start thinking somethings wrong with them and seek out extreme viewpoints. Society literally perpetuates the “incel culture” tbh.
A female teacher I know struggles with teenagers literally masturbating to them in class. This isn’t normal behaviour.
I don’t think calling it in ‘incel culture’ is very accurate.
Suggesting a large portion of secondary school aged boys loathe women doesn’t sit right with me.
They’re school children, they are supposed to be celibate. It’s just misogyny if anything. Calling a child an incel is implying they should be sexually active. Which is more fucked up than the misogyny.
I remember in school the female teachers would treat the boys like cess pits and they wondered why they acted out, whilst the male teachers treated everyone fairly and the classes would be a totally different.
We are raising feral boys who have no father figure at home or in the school place and are looking to internet wannabes or local gangster fuck wits as role models.
Plus it doesn’t help that working class boys are treated as if they have the same privilege as upper classes, just look at the likelihood of working class boys to go to university, if they were a minority in the UK the left would be screaming racism etc.
We were supposed to raise all boats in the harbour but instead we blew a massive hole in the working class boys boat and ignore the SOS signals….
Wow getting downvoted cos I’m not getting on the boys are inherently evil bandwagon…
Crime and punishment. Teenage boys are horny af, but if you punish the behaviour appropriately it will stop. When I was at school 15 years ago it was very difficult to discipline pupils, trying to give kids after school detention got responses from angry parents about kids missing the bus etc. I’ve spoken to a few teachers and they say the situation is now worse, after school detention isn’t possible and even taking away break times is even difficult.
If you have no way to discipline pupils then you won’t have any control over negative behaviour.
I wanted to be a teacher at one point but there is not enough money out there to have me dealing with teenagers
And here we have another example of a word’s meaning being stretched to include broader, more general issues.
It follows the likes of terrorist, transphobe and racist, all words which had clear meanings but are now used as blanket terms and therefore lose their precision and power.
My partner is a teacher and regularly reports the usage of incel language in his classes, but it’s never taken seriously. Glad to know he’s doing the right thing
I mean you can get to anything with 5 random clicks on YouTube. Fuck I mind starting off watching Warhammer lore videos and a few clicks later I was watching something about number station conspiracy shit and DMT.
There’s definitely a problem with a small section of teens that are just fucking ferral. Boys girls seems to make no difference.
It’s unacceptable behaviour but it’s not a surprise at all.
Just read the report ‘a boy today’ that came out last year. It was a cross party report that basically shows boys are left behind in education and lower class boys have fewer opportunities.
That coupled with the multi studies that show female teachers treat boys as lesser and are harsher with their marking etc it’s not a surprise.
I bet a lot of working class boys see no future for themselves and see their teachers treating the girls better. It’ll no doubt lead them into the arms of people in the ‘incel’ community.
You always knew this type of person when you were younger, you couldn’t avoid them as a teenager because there were so many
From what I remember, by the way they used to talk about these things, the root as far as I can tell it was very low self esteem, with them seeing sex as the ‘quick fix’ to feeling better about theirself (which is different to how a well rounded person would frame sex). It was like an acceptance thing. They don’t see it as an experience between two people, they wrongly see it as women as denying the thing which will ‘fix’ them. In reality it’s a more deep rooted psychological issue which needs addressed to make them feel like they don’t “need” that
On that basis I believe the solution is proper funding for mental health services
(Disclaimer should people need it, clearly not all men and boys with mental health issues will behave this way)
This issue is so much more complicated than focusing on a victim group. It is a failure to frame this as being important only because it is distressing for the teachers rather than a failure of the system for the children.
Boys have a lack of positive and constructive role models and stories. Even something as simple as fairy tales teach boys they’re either the hero who gets the princess or the wolf/villain. This perpetuates through the entire education system.
Then there’s social media constantly pushing the narrative of ‘all men’ and that internalised idea that boys are innately monsters perpetuates. This is why when people say these things they need to remember it’s closing the conceptual door on men not being monsters.
Worst of all the hidden challenges that teenage boys face are seen as non issues. Almost every boy will experience violence of some kind. They are more likely to be killed. They are more likely to be victims of a crime. But this isn’t seen as an issue and in turn, boys are taught that violence is ok – meaning they eventually use violence as it hasn’t been taught as wrong, more likely to commit crime because it’s so normalised.
The solution is not to hear how awful it is for the teachers.
So many comments about female teachers being universally shit and how boys don’t have a chance in single mother households and not a single one considering the effect this kind of language must be having on the girls in the classroom.
it has been noted that the girls have been dealing with a rise of aggressive sexual bullying and harrassment but typical uk education it only becomes a problem when it starts the affect the teachers. Incel attitudes needs to be dealt with throughout the school years. my daughter had some very unpleasant experiences in reception year. the school took their sweet time to tackle it. in the end I had to give the headmistress step by step instructions.
This has been the case among teenage boys for decades at the very least, there has just been little reporting of it. I went to an all-boy’s school in the 00’s and the behaviour would be sickening to a modern observer. Violence, misogyny and otherwise demeaning sexual terminology and bullying. It unfortunately can easily become normalised within such groups without outside intervention. Then sadly once this happens it is much easier to demonise and punish than it is to fix.
If you look at educational achievement, crime and suicide levels teenage boys and young men are something of a “left behind” group that doesn’t recieve sufficient guidance. There needs to be more mentoring of teenage boys, further attempts to understand their issues and challenges, guidance towards apropriate behaviour and away from peer pressure towards indecent or criminal behaviour. Often boys have few male and female role models and in schools it is common for more of a prisoner/guard relationship to form rather than a bilaterally respectful one. I am not sure entirely how this can be overcome, but I think with greater: coaching, building of young men’s confidence and inspiration there would be much more hope of success.
As a male secondary school teacher, let me just get one thing out of the way. Whether we like it or not, teenagers “mask” themselves onto adults who are like them — ethnic minority kids look up to ethnic minority teachers, female students seek out female teachers, and boys like to ask male teachers about things like exercise. I don’t like that this is the case, but it’s part of what happens when you go from being a narrow-minded teenager to being an open-minded adult. So I’ve reluctantly accepted that teenage boys are more likely to listen to me on these matters, even if I’m not always the most qualified person to speak to.
With that in mind, I don’t know if it’s the case that teenage boys are getting any worse in terms of their actions and behaviour — testosterone has always made teenagers do stupid things — but I will say that the sexist language they use is more clearly influenced by the incel and manosphere cultures online, which basically teach them that feminism is to blame for gender inequality (oh the irony). It’s old sexism with a new lexicon. I usually have to give the boys in every class that I teach a chat about why I’m a feminist, and why that (crazily enough) doesn’t stop me from going on dates with my wife, exercising or watching football. Yes, this is a concept they sometimes don’t understand.
As with any sexist view, most boys fall into these false dichotomies because they see girls as “the other”. Although this separation is reinforced in friendship groups, on social media and in mass media, it’s always been there — let’s not forget that we’re only a few years out from Page 3 girls and Nuts magazine. I distinctly remember boys posting up torn out pages of lads’ mags on our Sixth Form notice bord when I was at school. Saying it’s a new development ignores the underlying issue, which is that gendering things as being “for boys” and “for girls” creates dichotomies that lead to boys and girls segregating themselves (and yes, PE lessons contribute to this too, sadly).
In turn, I’m willing to agree that conversations around rape culture and privilege don’t always help this matter either, since they are often inherently gendered. But it’s not as if ignoring these things prevents boys from doing them, and young men do need to be made aware of the difference between how they see themselves and how they are seen by society, in the same way that a young black man needs to know that n incompetent police officer might see him differently to how he sees himself.
There’s no easy solution to any of this, but as long as teachers try to avoid gendering their students and making sweeping generalisations about boys and girls, then at least we’re fundamentally altering our thinking and modelling a more equitable society for our students. And I know from doing audits in to primary schools and other secondary schools that the younger teachers are beginning to do that.
I can’t help but worry that terms like “incel culture” exacerbate the problem.
Most teenage boys are celibate, and not voluntarily. Using the term “incel” as a negative characteristic is not going to get them on your side.
Those who recognise that they are involuntarily celibate, and offer sympathy, then become extremely attractive to these kids. But these communities are unhealthy, generally focussing on the anger rather than solutions.
Being an awkward teenager can be frustrating. They end up frustrated, but they need support, not disdain.
As a male teacher, I’ve noticed similar behaviour. I wouldn’t say they are incels but are starting to tick the boxes. Too many are misogynistic but it’s clear where it comes from – home. They are and hear the language at home, their parents think they can do no wrong (and this doesn’t just apply to these boys) and they create echo chambers with their friendship groups. It’s not LOADS of them but it’s enough.
This doesn’t surprise me – I don’t doubt that misogyny has been a problem in schools for a long time, but the Internet has provided essentially a formalised pipeline to misogyny these days for disaffected teenage boys.
It’s easy for boys to feel lonely, isolated, or romantically incapable at school, and even easier to look for answers to those problems online. 30 years ago you’d have asked your parents or a friend and they’d probably have given some decent advice reinforced with the general cultural biases at the time.
Nowadays, the problem lies with the ease of going from searching for “how to get a girlfriend” to things like Red Pill/PUA/seduction, or rabid right-wing anti-feminist content, or incel communities in this case. It’s hard to stay in shallow waters when there’s algorithms in everything you use pushing more extreme content in your YouTube sidebar or your Tiktok feed.
These communities provide extreme answers and negative emotional validation to your problems. The women and girls at your school are hypergamous sluts to be manipulated for romance/sex, or they’ve gone too far with feminism and now can do whatever horrible things they want, or they would just never look at you in a million years because you’re subhuman to them. These are all things that make you angry and get you invested. You learn all the lingo and terms that make you incomprehensible to others outside that bubble and drive you deeper in.
The ultimate problem is that teenage boys are looking for answers to why they feel bad the way they do, and the easiest way to get those answers (the Internet) pushes them towards answers that make them angry at women.
It even gets kids who are reasonably well-adjusted. If you like gaming, the online culture inherent among gamers and things like YouTube recommendations will push you towards “anti-SJW” content and then further and further down the rabbit hole. You can like Pewdiepie for games, get recommended his meme review series, watch the one with Ben Shapiro in it, and then start getting recommended Daily Wire nonsense. Congratulations, you’re in the pipeline.
For a realistic solution, teaching kids about the Internet as a place where critical thinking needs to be engaged is probably pretty vital. There needs to be talk of algorithms, of not accepting comments and videos and posts as fact, and of critically engaging with content. Put it in ICT or Citizenship or English class or whatever.
A more idealistic solution would be addressing toxic masculinity as a whole. These boys are not dealing with their emotions in a healthy way, and the pressure to be cool and manly and composed is probably a good part of that. Removing the idea that men must suffer in silence, whether dealing with their emotions internally works for them in a healthy way or not, would probably help these boys a lot – they could lean on friends and family and even teachers for support, and not need negative validation from extremist communities.
Itt: people who dont go to school and arent teachers just pulling cognitive dissonance out of their arses.
Teenage boys are using the lingo from incel communities you only find online, so its probably the massive attempt of right wing ideologies trying to recruit young men as opposed to too many _divorces_ or whatever bs.
There is a concerted culture war going on and we need to do something about it – but won’t, because it helps the right gain “anti woke” warriors.
Really worrying how online culture is no longer being contained online, these kids grow up with the internet as such a big part of their life from a very young age so they really don’t see the difference. They’re exposed to so much violence and hate and sexual content that is often fucked up. It’s bound to have an impact. Teachers can’t be the ones responsible for fixing it.
Bloody hell, the comments in this thread are something else.
Apparently we fight inceldom by… teaching boys that they’re important and that schools/society is currently set up to favour women. Gee, that definitely sounds like it’ll work.
I’ve been talking about this very subject with a teacher. He said that misogyny is really popular with especially the younger high school students and that there are a lot of boys with the attitude that girls shouldn’t have rights.
Letting social media raise our kids is causing a lot of problems.
Edit: if anyone wants to see thhe type of nasty idiot I’m talking about, look for the replies to me from /u/azazelcrowley
Apparently women are the only people in history who have never suffered and this is men getting revenge for women being women or something.
Wow, it didn’t take long for this to become a ‘single mothers are to blame for men hating women’ thread.
I’ve taught a handful of odious little shits in my time. The difference between now and when I was at school is that they have access to inner ideology and support groups that are giving them an ideological framework and vocabulary for their bpoor behaviour.
Most of the (18-21) young men I’ve worked with are lovely, open and warm. Some are lost between what they’ve been told they should be by their cultural influences and their natural personalities/preferences. I.e. young men who get no pleasure from social/monetary competition- guys who just want to earn enough to keep them going while also giving them time to do what they enjoy, be that train spotting, drawing, reading, their buddies.
From my experience, young men don’t benefit from expectations that they should provide or succeed. They should be encouraged to find what they enjoy and find satisfying, even if it’s something they’ll never make big money out of. Figuring out the things that make you fulfilled is a big part of becoming a decent human being.
This thread really worries me. It’s as if people are refusing to acknowledge this rising problem.
In the boys school near me some of the lads took videos of their teacher, just like doing her job, and uploaded it on PornHub as well as editing pics of her like face on pornstars bodies. My boyfriend told me about it and I reported it to my school to tell the boys school but nothing was done
The issue is not “incels”; that’s a snappy buzzword used by the media and internet to enrage people. It is easy to point at a single group of people (in this case unattractive virgin men) and say “Look! They are the problem; we get rid of them and everything goes back to normal!”
Guess what: that isn’t how you tackle a systemic problem stemming from a wide range of cultural and societal issues.
Do ugly virgin teenager resent women because they feel isolated? Some of them, yes. But that is a much smaller number than the number of socially popular people that also dislike women.
Implying that it’s only virgin losers that are misogynistic ignores the vast number of men that commit acts of domestic violence, consume misogynistic media, or are products of a misogynistic father/culture.
Of all the violent and sexist men I have had the misfortune of encountering, not one of them has been a virgin.
Sounds to me like another “boys will be boys!” situation where blaming something related that is not the root cause is the solution.
Women have been dealing with misogyny forever. I don’t even want to begin to talk about some of the shit the boys would say/do in the early 2000s before “incel culture” even existed.
We’re blaming the internet instead of blaming society for not addressing this shit already. Get your fucking boys under control before they grow up to be predators. It’s not rocket science.